Raising the $3500 limit?

Originally Posted by JakeGallagher

This year we got a Leadership in Control award, and the only laptop we used was an old WinBook MIT donated to us. Judges don't care whether you have PowerMacs (as one team did) or flashy stuff like that when they are looking for the Leadership in Control Award--they're looking for the team who put the most effort into making their control system work perfectly. Though, I don't think our programmer would mind much if we had some better hardware...

I think you missed his point. There have been teams that invest quite a bit into their operator interface such as T3 this year with their mini arm to control their real arm. If FIRST were to include the OI into the 3500 dollars, teams might not even have enough money left of that 3500 to even build an OI and then they end up having their OI mounted on a piece of plywood with 4 joysticks. Anyway, there have been some awesome achievements when it comes to OIs, such as T3 and 25 (I think they did too) with their mini arms or 447 with their glove controls, which probably wouldnt' have been possible if FIRST were to put the OI into the $3500...so to the original person who suggested that, I disagree.